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Introducing technology into the Linux kernel

2008; Association for Computing Machinery; Volume: 42; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1145/1400097.1400099

1943-586X

Paul E. McKenney, Jonathan Walpole,

Parallel Computing and Optimization Techniques

There can be no doubt that a great many technologies have been added to Linux™ over the past ten years. What is less well-known is that it is often necessary to introduce a large amount of Linux into a given technology in order to successfully introduce that technology into Linux. This paper illustrates such an introduction of Linux into technology with Read-Copy Update (RCU). The RCU API's evolution over time clearly shows that Linux's extremely diverse set of workloads and platforms has changed RCU to a far greater degree than RCU has changed Linux---and it is reasonable to expect that other technologies that might be proposed for inclusion into Linux would face similar challenges. In addition, this paper presents a summary of lessons learned and an attempt to foresee what additional challenges Linux might present to RCU.